// 402.316.2120
Clear Solutions. Custom Design.
We want to say congratulations to Jim Nash, the next mayor of the Minneapolis suburb of Waconia! We were privileged to have the opportunity to work with Jim and provide him a website that presented his values, identity, and campaign events. Congratulations, Jim! We are excited to watch you serve your community as their mayor.
http://www.jimnash2010.com
The world of design offers a lot of possibilities for designers and entrepreneurs alike. And truth be told, no designer wants to design a stale, boring design piece and no entrepreneur wants to completely blend in. However, it is important to note that in the midst of design and branding, the focus of presenting a unique brand the properly tells your story is never more important. If your brand in any way leads people in direction anywhere beyond what you are actually offering, your brand has defeated its purpose. Your purpose is also defeated if your business appears generic, stale, or cookie-cutter.
Seth Godin provides a great assessment of the importance of having a quality descriptive brand name.
“Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town.
It’s a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable. “Here honey, I bought you these cheap earrings at Diamond World!” Not only are they bland, but you can’t even remember one over the other. This is the absolute last refuge of a marketer who has absolutely nothing to say and can’t even find the guts to stand for what they do. It’s just generic.
The second reason this is an exceedingly dangerous strategy is that if you start to succeed a little bit, you suddenly want to protect your lame name. So you hire a lawyer and start to harass people for using the English language. So Computer Land sued Business Land (or maybe it was the other way around) and lost. Or consider the angry lawyer at Jewelry Village (or was it Central, I can’t remember) who sent a letter to Squidoo complaining about an editorial (not a retail) page that used the phrase. There are more than 15,000 matches for this phrase in Google, which means he’s got a lot of letters to send, and a lot of people to annoy. For what? Even if he manages to make a lot of noise, he’s just reminding the world how generic the phrase is in the first place. Can you name one successful brand (except Pizza Hut and I think they succeeded despite the name) that managed to pull this off? [Yes, there's Central Market and IHOP and Radio Shack... thanks for the submissions. I'm going to argue that in each case, the name slowed down something else that was truly powerful...]
You can do better.”
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/03/a-dumb-branding.html
With all of this it is important to keep in mind what your brand actually is. The identity of your brand really is multiple.
Your brand is:
1. Your Company Name & Your Product Name(s)
2. Your presentation – regardless of format (spoken & visual presentation, business cards, store front, website, etc.)
3. You and your employees (The employees of Zappos.com are a great example of the importance of acknowledging the branding power of your employees because customer service is very much a part of a brand.)
4. Your reputation inside and outside of your industry
5. Your Mission
6. Your Vision
7. Any slogans or tag-lines
8. Employee policies
9. Company Culture
10. Corporate Culture
We had the pleasure of designing a deal centered website that allows one to share deals in their local market with friends and followers. With this design we sought to capture the perspective of the shopper seeking to plan out their purchases for themselves and their families. The result was a classy and whimsical site that captures the local market and purpose of the site.
